Scalable electrochromic nanopixels using plasmonics

Abstract

Plasmonic metasurfaces are a promising route for flat panel display applications due to their full color gamut and high spatial resolution. However, this plasmonic coloration cannot be readily tuned and requires expensive lithographic techniques. Here, we present scalable electrically driven color-changing metasurfaces constructed using a bottom-up solution process that controls the crucial plasmonic gaps and fills them with an active medium. Electrochromic nanoparticles are coated onto a metallic mirror, providing the smallest-area active plasmonic pixels to date. These nanopixels show strong scattering colors and are electrically tunable across >100-nm wavelength ranges. Their bistable behavior (with persistence times exceeding hundreds of seconds) and ultralow energy consumption (9 fJ per pixel) offer vivid, uniform, nonfading color that can be tuned at high refresh rates (>50 Hz) and optical contrast (>50%). These dynamics scale from the single nanoparticle level to multicentimeter scale films in subwavelength thickness devices, which are a hundredfold thinner than current displays.

All-dielectric metasurface for high-performance structural color

“…Despite of the above continuous successes, the practical applications of structural color in surface decoration 24 , digital displays 25 , molecules sensing 26 , optical security 27 , and information storage 28 are still restricted. This is because both types of structural color only possess one or a few the above unique characteristics, far from the commercial requirements.…”

Recent advances in gold nanoparticles for biomedical applications: from hybrid structures to multi-functionality

“…2d). 27,28 The shell layer can then be further functionalised by another material or ligand. However, the level of complexity and structural diversity can be limited by the yield of each step in the series.…”

Active plasmonic nanoantenna: an emerging toolbox from photonics to neuroscience

“…A concerted and interdisciplinary effort has been devoted to the development of active systems in realization of postfabrication dynamic reconfigurability in a fully reversible and repeatable, fast, and ideally programmable manner. Until now, a variety of schemes have been proposed and developed in pursuit of in situ active control by electrical [153][154][155], chemical [156][157][158][159], optical [160], thermal [161], or mechanical [162][163][164] [165], tunable flat lenses [166], holograms [167], dynamic switches [66], interferometry photonic platforms [168], neural activity tracking [10,69], and information encryption [169]. Physical mechanisms behind these active plasmonic devices can be understood using lumped optical nanocircuit theory.…”

“…To date, researchers have harnessed strong lightmatter interactions enabled by PNAs to create novel LD PNA configurations with varying degrees of sophistication. Beyond the traditional split nanodipole antenna layout [145,[237][238][239], LD PNAs have been designed in a sphere-, rod-, disc-, and dumbbell-shaped core-shell heterostructure [10,160,177,[240][241][242], heterodimer [73,181,243], composite trimer [244], molecular-level grafting [70,[245][246][247], and atomic-scale filamentary bridge [153,176] configurations. In all these proposed nanoantenna configurations, the thickness of the nanoload is generally not larger than the electromagnetic field decay length of LD PNAs.…”

“…Ultrathin nanoloads not only facilitate the exploitation of the strong light confinement and local field enhancement offered by PNAs but also permit efficient coupling of the local physical mechanism to the external stimuli within the subwavelength feed gap volumes (∼nm 3 ). Until now, a wide range of active materials, including photoconductive semiconductors (silicon) [237], graphene [176], conductive filament [153], metal (silver) [177], metal hydrides (e.g., Pd) [73,243], conductive polymers [10,160,177,[240][241][242], and nonlinear optical materials [32], have been employed as tunable nanoloads (Figure 9). These nanoloads change their optical properties depending on external stimuli, such as pH and ionic strength change, light excitation, temperature variation, phase transition, electrical gating, and magnetic tuning [70,242].…”